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Definition of gravedigger in US English:

gravedigger

noun

‘He said they employed two gardening staff and five gravediggers to carry out maintenance of the cemeteries including grass cutting, grave maintenance and burial ceremonies.’

‘No final words are spoken, no ceremony is performed, and the only witness is the gravedigger.’

‘At the muddy cemetery, where gravediggers have opened up two new tracts during the past three days, relatives opened the tiny coffin of the eight-year-old, touching his forehead and kissing him goodbye.’

‘It spent months talking to everyone from gravediggers to doctors, deliberately avoided counting military deaths, and came up with 37,000 civilian killed.’

‘He eventually found her, lying dead, so slept next to her, only for them both to be collected by the gravediggers.’

‘A gravedigger at the site said more than 300 people were buried there.’

‘In fact, for many people, they couldn't even afford the fees of the gravediggers and their loved ones were buried with other coffins in a pile.’

‘I have decided to quit my job and become a gravedigger.’

‘‘Death will arrive early this year,’ says this bookkeeper of mortality, as he watches the sweating gravediggers plunge their spades into the hard, reddish-brown earth.’

‘As always, the gravedigger, after throwing in his handful of earth, had announced in a loud voice we were all invited to the traditional ham tea in the schoolroom.’

‘It also meant hospitals reduced to emergency cover by striking medical aides, and the dead left unburied by striking municipal gravediggers.’

‘In the first film of the festival, Ludwig, a gravedigger who has spent all his working life at the cemetery, loses his job and tries to fit into the world of the living.’

‘I looked all around again; over on the far side of the cemetery some of the gravediggers were filling in after a funeral earlier that morning, but no one was anywhere close.’

‘The unfortunate woman stood accused of the murder of the workhouse gravedigger and pleaded her innocence to the last.’

‘It is believed that shortly afterwards gravediggers stole his body, which ended up on a dissecting table in Cambridge, where a horrified acquaintance recognised it.’

‘The procedure took place at night, and, in order that the gravediggers could see what they were doing, a large fire was lit in the graveyard.’

‘He also admits that the job of the gravedigger is a very sensitive position because, as he says himself, everyone is famous in their own right.’

‘When Hamlet banters with the gravediggers, he becomes a clown himself, even if the subject matter is mortality.’

‘Before sunrise, they were joined by their other children at the cemetery as gravediggers worked by spotlight to raise the small coffin.’

‘Finally, the gravediggers had to dig down 13 feet through the snow and into ground hardened by six weeks of frost.’